Petfolk Is Building the Future of Veterinary Medicine, and a $10 Billion Business Along the Way

The first company teaches you that you can build. The second company forces you to decide how big you are willing to think.

Freshly was one of the most important gifts of my career. It gave me experience, confidence, and freedom. It also gave me something I did not fully appreciate until later: the ability to think in decades instead of quarters. When you have real financial security, you take bigger swings. You absorb more risk. You stay in the game long enough for compounding to do what it does best.

That changed me as a founder. I became more patient. More strategic about category choice. More focused on building something that would outlive any single funding cycle.

That is what Petfolk is for me.

The First Win Changes the Second Swing

After Freshly, I was not looking for just another startup. I was looking for a category I could spend the next 20 to 30 years compounding in. A market with strong macro tailwinds, durable demand, and a business model that could be repeated at scale.

Pet care checked every box. U.S. pet industry spending hit $152 billion in 2024. Ninety-four million households now own a pet. But the real opportunity was not the macro. It was the structure of the industry underneath it.

For the last two decades, most of the capital in veterinary medicine went toward aggregation. Buy clinics, bolt them together, extract margin. Very little went toward reimagining what the profession itself should look like. That created a real opening for a company built from first principles around the modern veterinarian, the modern pet parent, and the operating system needed to serve both.

We think the next great platform in this category will not be shaped by consolidation. It will be shaped by reinvention.

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.”

Why We Built Petfolk

This is where my sister becomes central to the story.

Dr. Audrey Wystrach has practiced veterinary medicine for 30 years. She saw a profession under real strain. Burnout, compassion fatigue, staffing pressure, and too many talented people losing the reason they entered the field. She also saw where the profession was going: 81 percent of 2024 veterinary graduates were female. As a veterinarian and a mother of three, she understood what was missing. She wanted to build a place where great people could practice world-class medicine, build long careers, and do it in an environment that actually fits modern life.

Her clinical vision and my company-building experience met in a simple idea: bring joy back to vet med. That meant building a company that helps veterinarians practice at the top of their license. More time on great medicine, less time fighting broken systems.

I learned this the hard way at Freshly. We invested heavily in the customer experience early. But we were slower to invest in the experience of the people inside the fulfillment centers. At Petfolk, we flipped that. The team experience came first. Everything else followed from it.

Compounding the Future of Veterinary Medicine

The repeatable win at Petfolk is simple. We build clinics that feel familiar, operate consistently, and run on the same culture, technology, and processes. We staff them with outstanding people. Then we transfer what we learn from one location to every other location and do it again.

We are not building a theory. In less than five years, Petfolk has grown to 36 clinics and is on track for 50 this year. Newsweek ranked us No. 2 on its 2025 Global Most Loved Workplaces list.

Early wins matter, not because they are the end goal, but because they give you the freedom to go build something far bigger than you thought possible.

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